EMERGENTcy

Innovation Killjoy

2011-09-24T08:41:00.000-07:00

Here's a great list of the 100 lamest excuses for not innovating on the Heart of Innovation website.

If you need to innovate, but find yourself procrastinating, your excuse is on this list. While you may have all the "proof" you need to prove yourself right, being right doesn't necessarily increase your odds of innovating. So, take a look, note the ones that bug you, and find a way to go over, under, around, or through them.
1. I don't have the time.
2. I can't get the funding.
3. My boss will never go for it.
4. Were not in the kind of business likely to innovate.
5. I've got too much on my plate.
6. We won't be able to get it past legal.
7. I'll be punished if I fail.
8. I'm just not not the creative type.
9. I'm juggling way too many projects.
10. I'm too new around here.

The recommendation for how to go beyond these excuses sounds very Basadur-like or NextD:

HOW TO GO BEYOND THESE LAME EXCUSES
1. Make a list of your three most bothersome ones.
2. Turn each excuse into a question, beginning with the words "How can I?" or "How can we?" (For example, if your excuse is "That's R&D's job," you might ask "How can I make innovation myjob?" or "How can I help my team take more responsibility for innovating?"
3. Brainstorm each question -- alone and with your team.
4. DO something about it within the next 48 hours.

The whole list is here.

2011-09-04T09:31:00.000-07:00

This article in the New York Times, "In Classroom of Future, Stagnant Scores," the difficulty in finding positive metrics to support the introduction of technology into the classroom is examined. At this juncture, technology may not be the lever in improving education scores that many were hoping. From a systems design standpoint, the root cause of declining or stagnant scores is most likely outside the tools of the classroom.

“Rather than being a cure-all or silver bullet, one-to-one laptop programs may simply amplify what’s already occurring — for better or worse,” wrote Bryan Goodwin, spokesman for Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning, a nonpartisan group that did the study, in an essay. Good teachers, he said, can make good use of computers, while bad teachers won’t, and they and their students could wind up becoming distracted by the technology.

Read the entire article here.

Voice of the Customer does not necessarily equal Innovation

2011-08-30T12:48:00.000-07:00

The tools for understanding customer needs and driving product or service business requirements are diverse and there is no one-size-fits-all tool that will work in every development instance. The article in Innovation Management by Tony Ulwick discusses where Voice of the Customer (VOC) is not an appropriate tool for innovation.

Innovation is successful when it targets customers’ needs, and yet nearly 90% of those polled in a recent IIR webinar survey reported that they had never worked on a new product in their entire career in which all the customer’s needs were known. Experts in the voice-of-the-customer (VOC) innovation technique shrug their shoulders when confronted with such facts. They say that customers do not know all their needs; customers have latent needs and needs they cannot articulate; their needs change quickly over time. We beg to differ. It is possible to know all the needs of a given customer group—it’s just that VOC has a misconception about needs, and, more fundamentally, it’s the wrong tool for the job.

The whole article is here.

The Fun Theory

2011-07-16T18:54:00.000-07:00

This is several years old now, but still excellent examples of how to design an experience to harness and enhance an existing human behavior. I love that most of these examples incorporate sound as part of the experience.

See all the examples here.

The Consolidation and Evolution of Music, Movies, Publishing, & Games

2011-07-15T14:44:00.000-07:00

Want a peek at where the "traditional" media product offerings are going? It might look something like this, Moonbot Studios "The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore":

Or you might check out Björk's new project Biophilia: http://bjork.com/

Or the coming Polyphonic Spree:

Dear Airlines, Please Don't Piss Off Famous People With Blogs

2011-07-15T14:30:00.001-07:00

Moby, from what I've heard, is one of more pleasant musicians touring these days. And this post on his blog about his experience with Air Portugal is nicely worded and could have been more pointed. But his worldwide audience of many, many fans can probably read between the lines:

so, they lied. but why? just for fun? just to torture tired travelling musicians? just to make annoying travel even more annoying?
did they get a memo from the devil that morning:
'whenever possible try to make air travel, which is already annoying, even more annoying.
sincerely,
the devil'

Read the whole post here.

Ericsson and Dave and his machines

2011-07-11T08:29:00.000-07:00

A nice critique by Sherry Turkle of a new Ericsson ad (presumedly a series) portraying life with social media and machines that are aware. Hard to know what the brand is saying at this point, but the first installment is definitely pointing toward the dark side.

Some of you are going to look at this video — the story of a young guy named Dave (that's Dave in the picture just above) who's on his way home to an apartment where his stove, lights, vacuum cleaner, microwave and fireplace are feverishly anticipating his return, and you're going to say, "Ahhhhh, let me be Dave. If only I could have a place wired like his."
Others of you are going to want to take a sledgehammer to every lamp, toaster, vacuum cleaner and microchip in the place — and perhaps to Dave.
I don't know which side of the Dream Technology Divide you are on, but trust me, this is a polarizing video.

See the ad and read the critique here.

UK Rail tickets fail basic usability

2011-07-11T07:41:00.000-07:00

Great article on how UK Rail tickets are designed for ticket takers, not train riders.

I overheard a familiar conversation on the train to London the other day. The ticket inspector was explaining to a passenger that their ticket was no good, the conversation went something like this.
Inspector: Tickets please Passenger: Here you go Inspector: I need both parts please Passenger: …. I only bought a single Inspector: Your ticket comes with a reservation. If you don’t have the reservation part you’ll need to buy a new ticket. Passenger: (Cue panicked fumbling through bags)… Oh here you go. Inspector: …Ahh see you’re on the wrong train. This ticket has booked you on the 7.45.
The passenger had to buy another ticket, or risk a penalty fare.
This got me thinking (As I looked down to check my own ticket). No wonder they didn’t know what train they were allowed to catch. These tickets make no sense. They are designed for ticket inspectors. Not for travellers.

You can read the entire article here.

Frank Gehry and Principles of Design

2011-07-08T12:00:00.000-07:00

A great article by Christian Saylor in UX Magazine on design principles that inform the work of Frank Gehry, but also apply to any design effort.

Time and time again we see Frank Gehry, with great intention and thoughtful discipline, building great experiences around the needs of people. He never once started a project with the end goal of pleasing his client; rather, he approaches each engagement with a continuous devotion to the end user.
So if we take the Three Principles of Being Frank:
purpose before presentation
explore and iterate
shape and movement
we begin to see some very foundational UX practices.

Full article here: http://uxmag.com/design/lets-be-frank

Clifford Geertz and the "thick description"

2011-07-02T10:23:00.000-07:00

Another nice article by Jon Freach at Frog Design in the Atlantic:

http://m.theatlantic.com/life/archive/2011/07/what-designers-can-learn-from-a-pioneering-anthropologist/241333/

Sometime in the mid-90s, when I was learning how to use research in the design process, a mentor of mine, Rick Robinson, would hold book reviews on Fridays at e-Lab, one of the first ethnographic research consultancies that helped design firms, advertising agencies, and corporations understand their users and customers. During one of those late afternoon sessions, he introduced Clifford Geertz's book The Interpretation of Cultures and spoke about the role and importance that a "thick description" plays when describing our experiences in the field.

The Art of Design Research (and Why It Matters)

2011-05-29T09:10:00.000-07:00

Measuring behavior and understanding the reasons for that behavior are key requirements for any design pursuit, whether that is designing a new product, or creating the marketing for that new product. This article in The Atlantic gives four benefits for design research:

Recently, my colleague Ben McAllister contributed a piece to this section called "The 'Science' of Good Design: A Dangerous Idea." In it he cautioned against a simplistic view of research as it applies to the design process because it's often synonymous with science—a discipline known for providing "hard truths" about the world. This leads people to believe (sometimes falsely) that "the research" will do the same for business. I am a researcher and a designer, and his article does raise a worthwhile question: "What is research good for, and how can we use it for the purpose of design?"

Designers thrive when they have a working concept of what makes people tick, a context that allows them to shape their ideas by considering what people covet and use, and somewhere to focus all their creative energy. Research can provide the fuel for new ideas. To Ben's point, design research isn't a scientific endeavor aimed at finding truths. Our clients typically can't afford the large sample sets and extended time frames necessary for such a "scientific" process.

And sometimes design teams don't have the patience to see the value in dragging out a study in an effort to make it scientifically or statistically significant. We're just not wired that way; we prefer to make and experiment and then analyze later. So what is research good for?

http://www.theatlantic.com/life/archive/2011/05/the-art-of-design-research-and-why-it-matters/239561/

Videotaping the DEMCMCAH

2010-05-22T17:34:00.000-07:00

Families, like organisms, adapt over time to the environment they exist within. My Grandparents' family behaved in very different ways to how my family behaved when I was growing up, and my own family has also evolved in how it behaves and operates. While this seems like a "so what" observation, there is not much research out there that confirms or disproves that idea. So this article in the NY Times seems timely.

At a conference here this month, more than 70 social scientists gathered to bring to a close one of the most unusual, and oddly voyeuristic, anthropological studies ever conceived. From 2002 to 2005, before reality TV ruled the earth, researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, laboriously recruited 32 local families, videotaping nearly every waking, at-home moment during a week — including the Jacket Standoff.
Filmmakers have turned a lens on the minutiae of unscripted domestic life before, perhaps most famously in “The Osbournes” on MTV and the 1970s PBS program “An American Family.”
But the U.C.L.A. project was an attempt to capture a relatively new sociological species: the dual-earner, multiple-child, middle-class American household. The investigators have just finished working through the 1,540 hours of videotape, coding and categorizing every hug, every tantrum, every soul-draining search for a missing soccer cleat.
“This is the richest, most detailed, most complete database of middle-class family living in the world,” said Thomas S. Weisner, a professor of anthropology at U.C.L.A. who was not involved in the research. “What it does is hold up a mirror to people. They laugh. They cringe. It shows us life as it is actually lived.”

How to put your brand into the garbage in one easy step

2010-02-25T18:54:00.000-08:00

When companies mess up, social media can amplify that mess by orders of magnitude.

Maintaining brand standards all the way to the literal curb is probably one of the hardest things to accomplish. The best planning and execution deteriorates quickly on the ground when once invisible mistakes get broadcast through the web.

Lisbon Airport Surprises Holiday Travelers

2010-01-22T13:38:00.000-08:00

We've written about some of the brand horrors suffered by the airline industry. Here's one to show the positive side. Albeit that it's staged by an airport, but let's face it, much of the experience of air travel is firmly in the airport and less so in the air.

New MadeleinePeyroux.com website launched

2009-10-19T19:13:00.000-07:00

Rounder/Decca Records pop/jazz/blues recording artist Madeleine Peyroux is a long-time client of Emergentcy. We manage her digital and social media strategy and maintain the various websites and social media pages that connect to her world-wide audience.

We recently collaborated with Madeleine on a remake of her official website and a new design to highlight the back-to-basics musical approach to her latest CD Bare Bones.

The site launched last night and both artist and fan reaction have been gratifying.

Visit the site at http://www.madeleinepeyroux.com

Paradyme Shift Trickles Down To USPS

2009-07-25T07:34:00.000-07:00

This Washington Post article describes how personal and business internet usage is having severe impacts to the status quo operations of the U.S. Postal Service, with one visible result being the removal of the ubiquitous blue mail collection boxes from communities around the country.

The seeds of what we now know as the internet were sown in the mid-'60s to early '70s, and twenty years later became the first commercial online services and products we, the public, could purchase and use. Now, nearly another twenty years have past, and the impacts to traditional services and media are well documented. Music, movies, gaming, newspapers, reservations, banking, retailing, and communications have all been transformed by this paradyme shift. Of course, the post office would feel it, too.

Neither snow nor rain not heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.

Perhaps not, but maybe the internet will.

Dorothy and Andrew Yankanich moved into their $18,000 brick rambler in Wheaton in 1966 and soon began what would become a daily ritual: Walking across the street to the squat blue mailbox and dropping off bills, birthday cards, letters, catalogue orders and whatever else needed to be sent on its way. For 43 years, in rain and shine, through the raising of seven children, the friendly box they could see through their front window's lace curtains was always there.

Until, one day at lunchtime a week or so ago, it wasn't. Yankanich, 82, watched as postal workers hacked at the rusted bolts and hauled the box away for good.

The full article is here

Community Arts and Social Media

2009-07-09T11:11:00.000-07:00

This post on Mashable lists exemplar case studies of community arts organizations using social media to great effect.

As more diverse organizations dive into web marketing, for-profit organizations can learn well from their indie counterparts about experimentation and innovation online. A few notable community and arts groups have been inventive in their use of social media and truly collaborative in their outreach in ways that even the most seasoned corporate marketer can appreciate.

Among the arts and community organizations using social media thoughtfully and in big ways (which aren’t necessarily representative of their limited budgets) are independent artists and companies in photography, film, modern art, radio and craft. They’ve capitalized on the audiovisual nature of the Web to showcase the storytelling and community-building aspects of their work, and the results are worth a pass-along.

http://mashable.com/2009/07/08/community-arts-organizations/

Music Labels Reach Online Royalty Deal

2009-07-07T19:08:00.000-07:00

A New York Times article on Tuesday's agreement between Music Labels and SoundExchange and online broadcasters:

Webcasters with significant advertising revenue, like Pandora or Slacker, will pay the greater of 25 percent of revenue or a fee each time a listener hears a song, starting at .08 cent for songs streamed in 2006 and increasing to .14 cent in 2015. Pandora had $19 million in revenue last year and expects that to rise to $40 million this year.
Small sites with less than $1.25 million in revenue, like AccuRadio, Digitally Imported and RadioIO, will pay 12 to 14 percent of it in royalties. All stations will be required to pay an annual minimum fee of $25,000, which they can apply to their royalty payments.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/08/technology/internet/08radio.html?hp

United Breaks Guitars

2009-07-07T11:28:00.000-07:00

Bad brand experiences can sometimes inspire customers... to take revenge. Here's a great example of how social media and video services can turn an individuals bad experience into a mass shared bad experience.

UPDATES:

http://www.nbcchicago.com/news/local/United-Breaks-Guitars-a-Smash-Hit-on-YouTube.html?yhp=1

http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/chi-biz-united-breaks-guitars-video-ual-july8,0,4414385.story

And finally, THIS UPDATE:

http://www.newsday.com/business/ny-bzguit0715,0,7779013.story

Product Design Case Study: U2 & Barco

2009-07-04T07:32:00.000-07:00

Our team is working on a communications design product development project for one of our large, progressive clients. I found these three short, related videos that perfectly illustrate how innovative product design ideally works:

1) Establish creative/business need,
2) Understand objectives (especially your end customer) and limitations (especially related to ongoing, sustainable operations),
3) Closely collaborate between creative, business, technical, and implementation teams, and
4) Realize results

It's That Old Story of David vs. Goliath

2009-05-28T13:38:00.000-07:00

Malcolm Gladwell, writing for The New Yorker, talks about strategies underdogs can take to compete and win against bigger, better skilled and sometimes more complacent "big guys" steeped in tradition or ways of thinking.

Innovation often occurs when the rules are thrown out or used in the opposite way they were intended. Organizations must decide whether "David" actions are supportable and sustainable as a long term strategy, or if they are most suitable for short term goals and tactics.

Vivek Ranadivé is an elegant man, slender and fine-boned, with impeccable manners and a languorous walk. His father was a pilot who was jailed by Indira Gandhi, he says, because he wouldn’t stop challenging the safety of India’s planes. Ranadivé went to M.I.T., because he saw a documentary on the school and decided that it was perfect for him. This was in the nineteen-seventies, when going abroad for undergraduate study required the Indian government to authorize the release of foreign currency, and Ranadivé camped outside the office of the governor of the Reserve Bank of India until he got his way. The Ranadivés are relentless.

In 1985, Ranadivé founded a software company in Silicon Valley devoted to what in the computer world is known as “real time” processing. If a businessman waits until the end of the month to collect and count his receipts, he’s “batch processing.” There is a gap between the events in the company—sales—and his understanding of those events. Wall Street used to be the same way. The information on which a trader based his decisions was scattered across a number of databases. The trader would collect information from here and there, collate and analyze it, and then make a trade. What Ranadivé’s company, TIBCO, did was to consolidate those databases into one stream, so that the trader could collect all the data he wanted instantaneously. Batch processing was replaced by real-time processing. Today, TIBCO’s software powers most of the trading floors on Wall Street.

Ranadivé views this move from batch to real time as a sort of holy mission. The shift, to his mind, is one of kind, not just of degree. “We’ve been working with some airlines,” he said. “You know, when you get on a plane and your bag doesn’t, they actually know right away that it’s not there. But no one tells you, and a big part of that is that they don’t have all their information in one place. There are passenger systems that know where the passenger is. There are aircraft and maintenance systems that track where the plane is and what kind of shape it’s in. Then, there are baggage systems and ticketing systems—and they’re all separate. So you land, you wait at the baggage terminal, and it doesn’t show up.” Everything bad that happens in that scenario, Ranadivé maintains, happens because of the lag between the event (the luggage doesn’t make it onto the plane) and the response (the airline tells you that your luggage didn’t make the plane). The lag is why you’re angry. The lag is why you had to wait, fruitlessly, at baggage claim. The lag is why you vow never to fly that airline again. Put all the databases together, and there’s no lag. “What we can do is send you a text message the moment we know your bag didn’t make it,” Ranadivé said, “telling you we’ll ship it to your house.”

The Evolving Experience of Air Travel

2009-05-20T18:03:00.000-07:00

A new survey just released talks about customer service improvements the airline industry has made recently.

Passenger satisfaction with airline service rose 3.2 percent earlier this year, the first increase in six years, according to a University of Michigan study to be released Tuesday.

The increase came as the number of passengers dropped and airlines reduced flying. Also passengers checked fewer bags as luggage fees became more common, making it easier for airlines to keep track of the bags that remained. Enplanements on U.S. routes dropped 1.5 percent in 2008, according to the Federal Aviation Administration.

And if fewer passengers are the reason for the improved satisfaction score, imagine how happy they'll be this year, when the FAA expects domestic boardings to fall 8.8 percent.

This has not been my experience.

I took my first business trip of the year this week and several surprises were awaiting me as I navigated through my itinerary. Atlanta was my airport of origin for this trip, and Delta my airline of choice.

My first whirl on the new airline roller coaster was the inclusion of Northwest in the Delta landscape. The kiosk application, which was pretty good when it was Delta, was now some Frankenstein Delta/Northwest application whose touchscreen was intermittent and navigation logic was erratic. Doesn't make me feel good about that merger.

My second surprise (though I had read about this change some time ago) was the $15 charge for a checked bag. I don't begrudge the airlines for finding ways to increase their revenue, but I can't help but think this mechanism is counter-productive.

For this business traveler, it's another punch in the face for my continued loyalty. Yes, the fee is passed through to their clients, but it adds another delay to an already long process of getting to the plane, it adds another receipt to be reconciled in the expense report, and it appears to provide incentive to those who already overcrowd the cabin space with bags that really should have been checked in the first place.

It would make more sense to me to charge those who drag their bags onto the plane. The cost of delays in boarding, departure, deplaning, and resulting stresses on airline personnel and travel guests has got to be greater than the cost of checking baggage. I'd like someone to point me to the research.

My third jolt at the airport came at the newly redesigned security check lanes. Looks like a step in the right direction. Except when the security guy at the metal detector tells us (in his most pedantic voice) to put away our boarding passes ("We don't check those anymore").

I agree that checking the boarding passes at that point is superfluous, but TSA people, you've been pounding the "please have your boarding passes out and available" into our heads for eight plus years now. Please don't give us attitude about this change, make it the positive development that it is. Sell baby, sell.

The only upside to the trip, and my fourth and final evolution, was experiencing the on-board wifi on the flight. I expected a high priced, slow speed, buggy interface to the internet, but was surprised to find a very fast and responsive, easy to obtain connection to the web. Still too expensive for my regular use, especially after the $30 fees for checking luggage, but nice to know it's there if needed.

So in the final analysis, the nickle and dime mentality has made further inroads for the airlines and their brands, the TSA has taken eight years to make minor improvements in the people handling part of their process (but the Disney effect is miles away), and technology takes one step forward and one step back in service of the customer.